The Grooming of America (Part 5) – The Carrot Dangled Before the Horse
Editor’s Note: this is the 5th in a series. To read prior installments, click for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
Have you noticed how “elusive” financial independence seems these days? If you thought it was difficult to attain before the pandemic, just leave Biden in office for another two years, and I guarantee it will be all but impossible.
I firmly believe that the American Dream is inherently tied to financial freedom, by default. Yes, you could argue against that point…but do YOU know anyone that doesn’t want to be financially independent/free from the rat race? I rest my case.
Just a few decades ago, families were able to make a “living.” Emphasis on LIVING. They were able to thrive and maintain preferred lifestyles, on one income, while saving for the future and getting ahead.
Getting ahead? Ask your friendly neighborhood lower-middle class family in America, today, how easy that is?
According to a 2019 study at Stanford, quoting research by the PEW Institute and published by the census bureau, “The proportion of dual earner married couples more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, increasing from 25 percent to 60 percent” (Pew Research Center, 2015).
An even older article published by taxfoundation.org, notes that “Mothers worked during the 1960s but fewer than half of all married couples during that era were dual-earners.”
Fast forward to now…can you imagine what those numbers are, today?
This is partly due to the fact that’s it’s no longer a cultural shift, but a norm; but the cost of living has continued to rise steadily over the last few decades, while wages have not kept up.
The tides of the American Dream have turned…and not in a good way.
We’ve become a paycheck-to-paycheck nation, drowning in consumerism. It’s a hamster wheel that goes nowhere. And what’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting different results.
Isn’t that the story of America right now? Financially and politically speaking? When will we learn that democratic policies are the antithesis to freedom and prosperity?
It makes me wonder what an uncomplicated day in the life of 1950’s America, was like?
In my opinion, the shift into dual income earning households has not occurred organically. Just like Black Lives Matter, or Critical Race Theory, these concepts came from strategic narrative proponents of chaos and subversion of classic American culture. And yes, a myriad of other variables lent to it becoming reality, but the bottom line is, it was necessary to survive the racket that is imposed cost of living.
Enslavement disguised as progress.
Wouldn’t logic dictate that progress would look more like being ABLE to live comfortably on one income, rather than having to have multiple streams of income coming into a single household? Is it out of greed that people are all about side hustles these days?
No. It’s because fear of financial doom looms over our heads like the demonic dark cloud that followed Chicken Little around.
And Biden is America’s demonic dark cloud.
The game is rigged. Anyone who was paying close attention to market manipulation around the AMC stock debacle, when hedge funds got caught with their pants down on the shorts they were placing, knows it.
Under Biden, Americans are facing prices they’ve never seen, for things that are necessary for survival. That doesn’t leave much room for LIVING.
Personally, I’ve been putting off getting kerosene to heat my home in upstate New York; partly out of fear of finding out ‘how dark’ my winter is going to be, under Bidenflation, and partly because, by the grace of God, we have yet to see snow in these mountains.
Finally caving to the imminent need, I called my delivery company, and my fears were confirmed to the tune of over $7 a gallon, for kerosene.
Flashback to more reasonable days… kerosene was roughly $3.34 at the end of last winter. Expensive, but manageable.
A “dark winter” doesn’t even begin to cover what Biden has in store for us.
I’m not sure how this country is going to survive this administration for another 6 months, much less two years.
A typical random conversation in my community, almost always includes at least one of these statements or gripes…and I live in a predominantly democratic area that still doesn’t get it, “If only there was enough time in the day for a 3rd or 4th job. My grocery bill tripled. Looks like we’ll be choosing between food and heat this year. If only that investment I made would finally make a run for it. Did you hear the lottery is at nearly $2 Billion?”
What’s the bottom line behind most of these statements?
HOPE.
How many times have YOU played the lottery in some form, over the last couple years? If I must confess – it’s been a few, for me.
Behind these barely disguised pleas for freedom from the matrix of our realities, is a deeply seated spiritual need to fulfill our purpose and do more than survive…a need to thrive and a reason to HOPE.
Do you see the shift in what the American Dream means?
Today, we call it chasing paper… and a chase, it is, but there’s a difference between then and now.
Unlike the days of single income households where one earner was enough to not only secure a living but provide meaningful freedom to LIVE — Americans today are chasing that freedom to live and never seeing it come to fruition, no matter how hard they work.
They’re on that hamster wheel, running out of money, out of time, and going nowhere. The effort seems never enough.
Why do you chase something? Because you have a hope for its positive impact on your life.
We’re not engaged on a fair playing field of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, anymore, even though it’s always been the baseline hope in our worldview.
We’re chasing survival, today. LIVING is becoming the dream, and Bidenflation will be the nail in its coffin, if he isn’t removed from office and impeached with the rest of his cabinet.
This is the American Dream…dying…in real time.
Historically and culturally, we went from earning a LIVING that supported a thriving life, to chasing the life we want, in [hopes] of EVER HAVING IT.
The American Dream’s attainability has moved on the scale of plausibility. Like the carrot dangled before the horse’s bit, it seems always just out of reach, to keep one’s hope alive but contained, thereby motivating one to keep working toward hope always held, but never fulfilled.
Talk about waging war on the psyche of America. Always striving, but never arriving.
Even The Washington Post agrees that inflation hits lower income households, hardest. So, where does that leave families, today? It leaves them with having to have two incomes, if not more. Which, in turn, gives the government access to essentially raising America’s children and planting the seeds of the next phase of subversion of the American Dream.
If you listen closely, it doesn’t take long to realize that poverty is the grooming language of love for the left. Always the advocate, but never the answer. Because poverty-stricken populations are vulnerable and easy to control through needs, and they are also the populations that are living on HOPE.
Sounds like the perfect inroad for an empty promise con job. Or a leftist politician wanting to build on the Universal Basic Income narrative. They make life so hard that the handout becomes the savior, and all of a sudden freedom and the American Dream, disappear.
I look into the eyes of the people around me and I see the struggle. I feel the struggle. I sense the urgency and fear in their lives because their living, no longer provides a life, and it just keeps getting harder.
People don’t know what to do.
But what they need to do, is remember freedom and prosperity when they hit the midterm voting poles, [i.e.. $1.98 gasoline, $3 kerosene, safer borders and policies that had our economy seeing recovery in the middle of a globalist coup].
The odds don’t matter. The prize does.
And America needs to make a hard lunge for that carrot.
